Bad Dog Applications has released a holiday utility for owners of an iPhone, or iPod touch, which translates the user's own commonly-used sentences, or modifies one of the 250 stored sentences categorized for quick browsing and searching. The utility also allows the user to store any translation in a list of favorites.

BdTranslator uses the iPhone's accelerometer, being able to work in both portrait and landscape mode. To let the user easily see the translation in large text, BdTranslator includes a translation viewer, which can also be adjusted in size (using the custom settings for both text and tables). Intelligent one touch translations (for common sentences and favorite phrases) have been included for easy navigation, along with a bunch of features that allow the user to swap languages and change the in or out translation languages.

Speaking of which, BdTranslator works natively in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. For two way translations, BdTranslator supports 16 languages: English, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.

In order to do live translations, the application needs an Internet connection (3G preferred), while Japanese & Greek have some restrictions on their language translations, developer Bad Dog Apps notes.

The desktop version of the software (last updated this month) is available for download under the form of a free trial version right here on Softpedia. The application adds Language Translation right to your Menu Bar, enabling you to translate from English to 11 other languages simultaneously. Additionally, you can use Apple's Menu Services to do translations from any application on selected text (up to 1,000 characters), or bring in a file for translation from the Finder. You can then export the final translation into a .TSV or .CSV file. Such files are readable by Numbers or Excel on any Mac, Unix, DOS file systems.

Visit the App Store here to check out BdTranslator more closely, or why not even buy the app (three Pounds Sterling).